Review: Kate Tempest, a Young Poet Conjuring Ancient Gods

A wunderkind rapper and spoken word performer equally influenced by Wu-Tang Clan and Joyce, Bukowski and Blake; an English poet whose musical sense of language bridges the worlds of rap and traditional lyric verse; a fan favorite at the Glastonbury music festival who became the youngest winner of the Ted Hughes poetry prize. Such dichotomies not only attest to the 29-year-old Kate Tempest’s gift for shattering — and transcending — convention and conventional genres, but they also underscore the tensions and contradictions that fuel her dynamic art.

Tiresias, the blind seer in Greek mythology who lived as a man and a woman, is the presiding figure in her collection “Hold Your Own,” and the contemporary characters in her dazzling story-poem “Brand New Ancients” are also conflicted beings in search of a self. They are torn between confidence and self-loathing, between aching loneliness and the tumult of love, between ambition and a revulsion for the phony accouterments of fame. Ms. Tempest describes these ordinary people as gods, and their quarrels — so reminiscent of the squabbling among the Greek gods on Mount Olympus — are both petty and profound.

“There’s always been greed and heartbreak and ambition,” she writes,

and bravery and love and trespass and contrition —

we’re the same beings that began, still living

in all of our fury and foulness and friction,

everyday odysseys, dreams and decisions ...

Myths used to be “the stories we used to explain ourselves,” she observes, and to her, myths, like art, are a way to universalize individual dreams and suffering: They lend continuity and weight to the everyday struggles of life — “deadlines, debts, divorces” — and remind us that every person, every passer-by on the street, has an “epic narrative” within.

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CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times

At times, the people in “Brand New Ancients” recall the tired denizens of Eliot’s “Unreal City” in “The Waste Land” — which, the reader remembers, also mentions Tiresias, as one who has “perceived the scene, and foretold the rest” — trudging through their tedious day jobs, then trudging home in the twilight hour. At the same time, Ms. Tempest also gives us more intimate portraits of these characters that are reminiscent of Joyce’s “Dubliners.” She provides glimpses of them at many points in their lives — in childhood, youth, middle age, and on the downward curve toward death; and struggling with love and loss and fear and pride.

Writing in language that is, at once, musical and street tough, cadenced and conversational, Ms. Tempest creates portraits that feel both immediate and finely etched. There’s Kevin, “steady and plain,” and his restless wife, Jane, who’s “ready for change,” and Brian, unhappily married to Mary, with an angry son named Clive. Brian has an affair with Jane, who gives birth to his child Thomas — who, as family dramas so often play out in myths — will have a fateful encounter with Clive. Tommy, gifted and hungry, falls in love with Gloria — “the kind of girl whose scars run deep” — but even as he starts to achieve his dream of becoming an artist, he risks losing everything he’s dreamed of out of carelessness and self-absorption.

Like the great Philip Larkin, Ms. Tempest has an ability to write about big, metaphysical subjects in the most vernacular language, while conjuring a sense of contemporary English life with a handful of chiseled lines. In her case, it’s a London of pool halls and rave clubs and dingy flats, where “the gods can’t stop checking Facebook on their phones,” where “the gods are at the rave -/two pills deep into dancing —,” “messed up, lonely,/squashed, stressed out, dumbed down, raging,/wasted ... Same as it ever was: brand new ancients.”

As a rapper, spoken word artist and playwright, Ms. Tempest has an instinctive understanding of how the sound of words and rhymes can amplify emotion, and while her intense performances on stage add a fierce urgency to the words, these text versions of her work stand powerfully on their own on the page. She demonstrates a knack — in both “Brand New Ancients” and “Hold Your Own” — for being able to shuttle easily back and forth between the mundane and the mythic, the banal and philosophical, and for using her pictorial imagination to sear specific images into the reader’s mind: a child playing (or remembering playing) “games on the alleyway railing” and painting “potatoes whenever it rained”; and old Tiresias — who’s known seven lifetimes — picking “his teeth with a dirty needle,” keeping “his eyes in a plastic bag.”

She has a remarkable ability to convey, in “Hold Your Own,” what it is to be 7 or 13 years old, what it is to be 16 with “nothing but fury and bass/and dead friends that keep us close to each other,” and what it is to be old, “letting nothing take you by surprise any longer,” the “whole world spinning within you.”

She also conveys what it is to be a young poet, scribbling words on takeout menus and fliers for raves, and the mysteries of the vocation:

Seeking out a secret in

the light, the rain, the traffic.

A thing that makes him less alone.

Some sudden, brutal magic.

BRAND NEW ANCIENTS

By Kate Tempest

47 pages. Bloomsbury. $15.

HOLD YOUR OWN

By Kate Tempest

108 pages. Bloomsbury. $17.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Using Myths to Shatter Conventions. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe